Simplifying the visible URL element on mobile search results

Mobile searchers will soon see a cleaner, more streamlined look for how URLs appear in search results. Initially introduced as part of the « site hierarchy » feature, we’ve found that the breadcrumb element isn’t as useful to people who are searching on mobile devices, as it gets cut off on smaller screens. Starting today, we’ll no […]

Search Central Live is returning to Brazil

We’re excited to announce that Search Central Live is returning to São Paulo in 2025. Following our successful events in 2023 and 2024, we’re continuing our mission to help Brazilian businesses enhance their site’s performance in Google Search. And this year we’re visiting Recife for the first time.

Crawling out of December: the 2024 recap

It might happen that by the end of this post you’re going to try to decide who wrote this blog post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you’d be right to ponder that and delve into the intricacies of the language used that gives away LLMs, for this is the time of the […]

Crawling December: CDNs and crawling

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are particularly well suited for decreasing latency of your website and in general keeping web traffic-related headaches away. This is their primary purpose after all: speedy delivery of your content even if your site is getting loads of traffic. The « D » in CDN is for delivering or distributing the content across […]

Crawling December: Faceted navigation

Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite number of URLs, which causes all sorts of crawling problems.

Updating our site reputation abuse policy

Earlier this year, as part of our work to fight spam and deliver a great Search experience, we launched a spam policy to combat site reputation abuse. We’re clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavior. We’re making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to […]

Search Central Live Kuala Lumpur and Taipei 2024: Recap

The Search Central Live events in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei were nothing short of amazing, in large thanks to the over 600 people who attended the events! We were thrilled to see the level of enthusiasm and engagement from attendees even if, on the day prior to the Taipei event, we collectively had to deal […]

An improved way to view your recent performance data in Search Console

To better help you monitor the recent performance of your content, we’re launching the ’24 hours’ view to the SC performance reports and improving the freshness of the data. We’re rolling out these changes to all properties gradually over the next few months, so you might not see changes right away.

Crawling December: HTTP caching

Allow us to cache, pretty please. As the internet grew over the years, so did how much Google crawls. While Google’s crawling infrastructure supports heuristic caching mechanisms, in fact always had, the number of requests that can be returned from local caches has decreased: 10 years ago about 0.026% of the total fetches were cacheable, […]

Crawling December: The how and why of Googlebot crawling

You may have heard that Google Search needs to do a bit of work before a web page can show up in Google Search results. One of these steps is called crawling. Crawling for Google Search is done by Googlebot, a program running on Google servers that retrieves a URL and handles things like network […]